<p> This thesis explores the role of town-and-gown violence as a constructive force during the rise of three universities in medieval France: the university in Paris in the thirteenth century and the universities in Orl&eacute;ans and Toulouse in the fourteenth century. These universities became established fixtures in the social and political spaces of their respective cities partly as a result of violence between scholars and townspeople and the protracted arbitration and litigation that succeeded a violent incident. More specifically, various instances of town-and-gown violence created the circumstances through which the scholars and the townspeople in each city could negotiate new terms of coexistence, often through royal and papal mediation. In Paris, Orl&eacute;ans, and Toulouse, the involvement of the French monarchy in these conflicts became one of the major points of contention. Violence and conflict served as mechanisms by which the scholars and the townspeople sought to debate the way royal power was weighted. In each city, violent encounters and subsequent resolutions of conflict allowed the scholars to establish themselves as members of an enduring structure, defining their roles within the social and political networks of the city.</p><p>

In the fifth and sixth centuries CE, the Roman Empire fragmented, along with its network of political, cultural, and socio-economic connections. How did that network’s collapse reshape the social and mental horizons of communities in one part of the Roman world, now eastern France? Did new political frontiers between barbarian kingdoms redirect those communities’ external connections, and if so, how? To address these questions, this dissertation focuses on the cities of two Gallo-Roman tribal groups. The Aeduans and Lingons inhabited a strategic crossroads region in what is now Burgundy and Champagne, and between ca. 460-534 passed from Roman to barbarian rule – first under the Burgundians and then under the Merovingian Franks. Close prosopographical study of the written sources and distribution-analysis of material sources – coins and ceramics – illuminate the region’s experience of the end of Empire. An unprecedented study of the distribution of Burgundian coins found in France revises the consensus model for the movement of gold coins across the post-Roman West. The dissertation’s multiple independent types of evidence reveal and mutually corroborate previously unrecognized communication patterns in late antique eastern Gaul. During the fifth and sixth centuries, Aeduan and Lingon communication horizons contracted sharply but unevenly. To the northwest, where Burgundians and Franks faced off across a sometimes-tense border, traditional socio-economic ties withered almost completely, only to resume after the Frankish conquests of the 530s. To the south, however, throughout the fifth and sixth centuries, Aeduans and Lingons more easily forged long-range connections across a different but also frequently hostile political border, with the Goths. The struggles of violent kings, then, could decisively reshape communication networks, but did not always do so. To explain the importance of politics relative to other influences – social, economic, and environmental – the dissertation turns to social gravity and network analysis theories. The study culminates in a multi-scalar model for the complex and dynamic communications of late antique Gaul. That interdisciplinary approach models new methodological possibilities for explaining pre-modern communication history. / History

Focusing on a small number of richly illuminated manuscripts produced in Cologne around the year 1000—and known to scholars since the early twentieth century as the so-called "painterly" group of manuscripts—this dissertation takes the close study of a well-defined group of objects as the starting point for an examination of issues central to broader histories of medieval art. A diptych-like pairing of miniatures with inscriptions, each of which is given a full page, constitutes a characteristic feature of these manuscripts. Because these inscriptions were written specifically to accompany the facing images, the manuscripts from Cologne afford us a rare glimpse of a discourse on art and image making in the tenth and eleventh centuries, as well as providing insights into how such miniatures were meant to be viewed. The first chapter establishes a theoretical framework for the project, which examines both the historical and the scholarly origins of the Cologne School. Moreover, the concept of a "painterly" style is scrutinized and its use is traced back to significant developments in German art-historical writing of the late nineteenth century. The second chapter—devoted to a remarkable, yet relatively unknown tenth-century gospel book in Milan—demonstrates how the manuscript's carefully-crafted pictorial program draws upon an impressive tradition of Carolingian poetry and epigraphy in order to instill a pointed moralizing lesson on its recipient. A closely related sister-manuscript, preserved today in Paris, forms the subject of the third chapter, which demonstrates how the designer of its program employed philosophical and dialectical terms—taken from the school texts of the day—in order to devise an ambitiously complex set of miniatures and inscriptions, centered on a contemplative engagement with the paintings. The dissertation concludes with a chapter on the more famous Hitda Codex, illuminated at the behest of a powerful abbess in the early eleventh century. Through an analysis of the manuscript's narrative program, the chapter details how both image and inscription coordinate the active engagement of the viewer—prompting a consideration of the ways in which the pairings function as allegories of introspection. Throughout the dissertation I aim to reconcile the innovative formal qualities of the miniatures with the unusual complexity of their accompanying inscriptions. As a consequence of this study, it can be demonstrated that in the painterly manuscripts from Cologne, the close intertwining of image and inscription results in sophisticated programs of illumination, which elucidate an unprecedented contemporary reflection on the nature of painting in age otherwise known for its scarcity of written sources on art. / History of Art and Architecture

The so-called Crusader States established by European settlers in the Levant at the end of the eleventh century gave rise to a variety of Latin literary works, including historiography, sermons, pilgrim guides, monastic literature, and poetry. The first part of this study (Chapter 1) critically reevaluates the Latin literary texts and combines the evidence, including unpublished materials, to chart the development of genres over the course of the twelfth century. The second half of the study (Chapters 2–4) subjects this evidence to a cultural-rhetorical analysis, and asks how Latin literary works, as products by and for a cultural elite, appropriated preexisting materials and developed strategies of their own to construct a Frankish cultural identity of the Levant. Proceeding on three thematically different, but closely interrelated, lines of inquiry, it is argued that authors in the Latin East made cultural claims by drawing on the classical tradition, on the Bible, and on ideas of a Carolingian golden age. Chapter 2 demonstrates that Latin historians drew upon classical traditions to fit the Latin East within established frameworks of history and geography, in which the figures Vespasian and Titus are particularly prevalent. Chapter 3 traces the development of the conception of the Franks in the East as a “People of God” and the use of biblical texts to support this claim, especially the Books of the Maccabees. Chapter 4 explores the extent to which authors drew on the legend of Charlemagne as a bridge between East and West. Although the appearance of similar motifs signals a degree of cultural unity among the authors writing in the Latin East, there is an abundant variety in the way they are utilized, inasmuch as they are dynamic rhetorical strategies open to adaptation to differing exigencies. New monastic and ecclesiastical institutions produced Latin writings that demonstrate an urge to establish political and religious authority. While these struggles for power resemble to some extent those between secular and ecclesiastical authorities and institutions in Western Europe, the literary topoi the authors draw upon are specific to their new locale, and represent the creation of a new cultural-literary tradition. / Classics

Trecento Italy, the century of Dante and Petrarch as well as the mechanical clock, represented a pivotal moment of innovation to formal measures of time. These creative expressions reflected transforming notions of ingenuity, and of man’s ability to shape the world and time in which he lived. While the mythic awakening of the self-conscious individual in Renaissance Italy has been largely demystified, criticism has tended to overlook the concurrent shifts to the Trecento temporal imagination, born of parallel practices that sought to recover cosmogonic secrets, and thus power over time. An intriguing conceptual connection lies in the multifaceted ingegno (and its Latin ancestor, ingenium), not merely a faculty or talent but a touch of the divine within, the dynamic enactment of which impels movement in, and beyond, time. Privileging the exceptional ingegno of Trecento to Quattrocento Italy, my dissertation engages in a three-part investigation of its manifestations, which evoke temporal tensions in the dialectic between particular and universal, finite ontology and pure existential being. Part one re-examines the mechanical clock, both a symbol and instrument, and its complex relation to bells in Trecento Florence. Informed by these symbols, part two, turning to poetic ingegno, conducts close readings of Dante’s Commedia and Petrarch’s Canzoniere — granting particular attention to the orologio of Paradiso 10, and the circularity of sestina 30, “Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro,” each emblematic of the manner in which the poets reconstitute time. Finally, part three considers the centrality of the human “maker” in the time matrix of Quattrocento Florence, juxtaposing the strategies of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Girolamo Savonarola to maximize, and transcend, finite time. This multidimensional approach not only excavates a more complete image of time in Renaissance Italy, but also reimagines the progression from Dante to Petrarch, and Petrarch to Italian poetry thereafter. The examination, I suggest, illuminates a paradoxical legacy: on one hand, in the glorification of man’s creativity; and on the other, in the existential anxiety of the time-conscious individual, endemic to modern chronophobia. The increasingly abstracted and self-referential time bespeaks a conspicuous absence of the sacred center, anticipating the transience that has plagued modernity. / Romance Languages and Literatures

From the eighth century through the tenth, the ‘Abbāsid capital of Baghdad witnessed the translation, in unprecedented numbers, of Greek philosophical, medical, and other scientific texts into Arabic, often via a Syriac intermediary. Muslim and sometimes Christian patrons from all sectors of ‘Abbāsid high society paid princely sums to small groups of Graeco-Arabic translators, most of whom were Syriac-speaking Christians. In this diverse ‘Abbāsid milieu, who could claim to own the Greek past? Who could claim to access it legitimately? Who were the Greeks for ‘Abbāsid intellectuals and how did the monumental effort to translate them make or fail to make the Greek past a part of the ‘Abbāsid present? This dissertation is divided into three chapters, each investigating a distinct ninth-century approach to accessing the Greek past. Chapter 1 investigates ninth-century narratives attempting to explain how the Greek sciences came to flourish in ‘Abbāsid Mesopotamia. Against this backdrop, I shed new light on the polymath and patron of translation al-Kindī and his attempts to claim direct access to the Greeks via both an abstract teleology inspired by Aristotle and a concrete genealogy that connected his ancestral tribe of Kinda to the Greeks. In Chapter 2, I analyze other Muslim intellectuals, such as the litterateur al-Jāḥiẓ, who radically doubt the ability of Graeco-Arabic translators—the majority of whom, once again, were Christians—to provide such access to the Greek past. I argue that previous commentators on these critiques have missed their subtext, namely the Islamic concept of taḥrīf whereby Christians are held to have corrupted the Bible in order to transmit a distorted version of the prophetic past that contradicts God’s ultimate revelation, the Qur’ān. Finally, in Chapter 3, I investigate the attitudes toward translation and the Greek past of the Ḥunayn circle of Graeco-Arabic translators, who do in fact alter Greek cultural elements in the texts they translate, presenting an idealized version of the Greek past which both Christians and Muslims can claim. / Classics

No description available.

No description available.

A study of late medieval apocalyptic literature and culture, this project examines the interdependence of economic and religious discourse in the Middle Ages and investigates the shift in social consciousness occasioned by demographic changes and the growth of England's profit economy in the fourteenth century. After exploring the growing dissonance between religious tradition and economic language, the study examines expressions of social dissatisfaction, including the actions and communications of the 1381 rebels, William Langland's moral objections in Piers Plowman, and the complaints central to the other 'plowman poems' of Langland's imitators. Contrasting regenerative agrarian metaphors and apocalyptic visions with eschatological, urban visions of paradise, this study argues that Langland and the 1381 rebels exhibit 'radical nostalgia'--a longing for agrarian Christian roots in the midst of social tension which projects the traditional social structure of the past onto a renewed, if not millennial, society / acase@tulane.edu

The education of noble girls in medieval France| Vincent of Beauvais and "De eruditione filiorum nobilium"